Data cooperatives are organizations that store data on behalf of participants in the cooperative and share the data with the participants. A data cooperative is often operated as a service to which a participant can subscribe. Data that is provided to the cooperative can be specific to a particular field of data aggregation, such as data related to advertisement campaigns or data related to online transactions. Data cooperatives (or “cooperatives”) include many unique participants, such as organizations that share their own data assets with the cooperative in exchange for having access to the data held in common by the cooperative. A participant may join a data cooperative in order to increase the participant's knowledge about its customer base, or to increase its knowledge about potential customers. In return, the data cooperative may receive some or all of the participant's collected data assets. Data that is received from the participants may be held in a common data store that may be accessed by all participants.
In general, it is advantageous for a data cooperative to have many participants, to increase the size of the common data store. However, allowing unlimited access by different participants to the cooperative's data holdings may raise concerns regarding security and user privacy. A large, well-established data cooperative may be of sufficient size to provide data that is of interest for the current participants. However, the large size of the common data store may encourage small or new organizations to join, which may increase concerns about security. For example, a small or new organization may be unprepared for, or indifferent to, the security measures required to keep large amounts of user data safe. Furthermore, users who have some information stored in a data cooperative may object to having their information universally available to all participants of the cooperative, regardless of the size or reputation of the participants.
In addition, organizations with very extensive data assets may be reluctant to join a smaller cooperative. In some cases, the organization may have concerns related to maintaining the privacy of its customer base in regards to other participants in the cooperative. Additionally or alternatively, the cooperative's common data may be small relative to the organization's own data assets, and the organization may believe that adding its data assets to the cooperative's common store would provide a relatively greater advantage to the other participants, possibly competitors, while providing the organization with a relatively smaller advantage. Thus, it is desirable for a data cooperative to protect user privacy while promoting participation.
Current solutions for protecting user privacy and promoting participation are inadequate to address the drawbacks indicated. A technique that is sometimes employed by a participant is to withhold certain data assets from the data cooperative, such as withholding all data assets related to mobile devices. However, this technique does not safeguard the privacy of users whose information is related to the data assets that are not withheld. In addition, this technique encourages the participant to benefit from common data while preventing other participants from benefiting from the withheld data assets, and may limit the growth of the cooperative. For example, other participants, or potential participants, may view this practice as unfair, and may choose not to participate in the cooperative.
Alternatively, a solution that is frequently attempted by data cooperatives is to limit a participant's access to a certain quantity of the common data, where the quantity of common data is related to the amount of data provided by the participant. However, such attempted solutions do not adequately address concerns of either privacy or fairness. As an example, a data cooperative may provide a participant with access to twice as much data as it provides, such as allowing access to 400,000 common data records based on a contribution of 200,000 records. However, this attempted solution does not protect user privacy. For example, a user's information may be provided to a participant that the user finds objectionable. In addition, the received data may not include information relevant to the participant's business. These attempted solutions do not differentiate between participants that do or do not have existing relationships with individual users. Furthermore, even if the cooperative wishes to provide additional data to the participant, as a means of providing value, other participants may perceive the action as unfair, and choose not to participate.
Thus, existing solutions for controlling access to data cooperatives may present disadvantages such as (but not limited to) those described above.